Practical Team Management for Software Engineers

This course teaches you the skills and guidance to immediately make a practical impact on your team management capabilities. You'll learn how to be more effective at developing processes to manage and lead your team.

Course info

Rating

(20)

Level

Beginner

Updated

May 19, 2017

Duration

6h 42m

Description

As a new or current leader/manager of a technical team, you need the necessary tools, processes, and approaches to be successful in achieving your organization’s business goals. In this course, Practical Team Management for Software Engineers, you will learn how to align your activities to the business while managing customer expectations through effective communication techniques. Next, you will explore how to build your team’s structure, its capabilities and how to acquire just the right talent to join your team. Finally, you will learn 10 key basic software development processes that you can easily employ with your team. When you are finished with this course, you will have new methods, processes, and improved management skills to support your activities and responsibilities as a manager or team leader.

About the author

Michael is General Manager at Fairway Technologies, a San Diego based technology consulting company. Prior to that, he was Vice President of Development at PDSA, Inc. and has many years of management, technology, and leadership experience.

Section Introduction Transcripts

Course OverviewHi everyone, my name is Michael Krasowski and welcome to my course Practical Team Management for Software Engineers. So there you are, heads down and cranking out code, life is grand, and you just love being a software engineer. Then one day your boss says to you, hey I think you've been doing a nice job and I'd like you to be a manager and manage a team for me, maybe about 5 or 8 developers and I will need you to work with the customers, figure out and document requirements, determine your software development lifecycle, figure our your standards, your architecture, manage your work tasks, hire people, and all that stuff, and you know come up with all the team management things you think you need, and oh, by the way, you start tomorrow. If something like that has happened to you, then you've come to the right place, this course is for you. This course is your starter kit and as a new manager or a manager needing to acquire new skills, we'll be covering the following major topics and themes. Aligning IT activities to the business, managing customer expectations, building team structure and capabilities, acquiring the right talent, managing through effective communication, and promoting productivity through team processes. By the end of this course you will know how to begin your journey as a new manager or a manager looking to improve your skills with the confidence and skills necessary for your success. I hope you'll join me on this journey to improving your skills with my Pluralsight course Practical Team Management for Software Engineers.

Aligning IT Activities to the BusinessHello I'm Michael Krasowski from Pluralsight. I will be presenting the module Aligning IT Activities to the Business in the course Practical Team Management for Software Engineers. Let's cover the module topics. Why align IT to the business? Briefly we will discuss why it is important to your success as a manager to align all of your work to the business. Understanding alignment, we will discuss how I define alignment and what it should mean to you. Aligning the IT team goals to the business goals. Here we'll actually go through an example of aligning your work to the business and take you from business goals down to IT projects and activities. Next defining priorities. We'll discuss the different kinds of priorities and how you might derive, interpret, and apply them. Setting priorities, how to approach setting priorities of your work and making that visible and easy to understand. Next, the activity card, a very simple technique to visually capture the important attributes about a project or activity so that management and your team can easily see the project activity in the context of other activities and priorities. Okay great, let's get started.

Managing Customer ExpectationsHello, I'm Michael Krasowski from Pluralsight. I will be presenting the module Managing Customer Expectations in the course Practical Team Management for Software Engineers. Okay, here's the lineup for this module. Why manage customer expectations? I will let you in on a secret, the secret of customer satisfaction lies not in what you necessarily do, but in what the customer expects you to do. Defining customer expectations. We will discuss the realm of worth, merit, and importance of customer expectations and why these can make or break your career. Strategies for managing customer expectations, such as why every single customer interaction is an opportunity you can't pass up and we will see why. Service Level Agreements, SLAs, we will define what they are and give you a detailed example of one. Lastly, valuing customer service, we will discuss the role of worth and importance of customer service and a quick and easy way to measure it. Okay, let's get started.

Acquiring the Right TalentHello, I'm Michael Krasowski from Pluralsight. I will be presenting the module Acquiring the Right Talent in the course Practical Team Management for Software Engineers. Okay, at this point in the course we have aligned our work activities to the business, we have worked to improve and manage customer expectations, and we have built up our team's skills and capabilities, including training, so that we can perform, that is implement our task, our job, to the best of our ability. As our scenario lays out we have five people on our team, but there is no guarantee that those five will be with you forever, including yourself, by the way. Why do people leave? People may leave for other companies or maybe transfer to another position within your company, or worse case, you actually have to let someone go, yes, possibly fire them. Now all this churn, if you will, is called turnover. So be prepared for some amount of turnover, hence you will need to acquire new or replacement talent or new business will drive the need to grow your team and therefore hire more people. Okay, let's check out the topics in this module. Okay, here is the line up for this module. Team retention; finding the right talent; defining the job requirements, you know, what are all the skills and capabilities that you will need; the acquisition process, actually getting the people onboard; preparing and designing your questions, the interview questions, there is much more to this than you might think; and lastly onboarding, what are the steps to get them productive as quickly as possible. Okay let's get started.

Managing Through Effective CommunicationHello, I'm Michael Krasowski from Pluralsight. I will be presenting the module Managing Through Effective Communication in the course Practical Team Management for Software Engineers. Maybe by this point of the course you're thinking, what did I get myself into? We have talked about aligning our work to the business, how to structure and define the roles of our new team, how to build their skills and how to acquire new talent, nowhere in there are we doing much technically. Are you starting to miss the technical stuff? Or are you excited and motivated to learn and broaden not only your management skills, but enhance your future opportunities in leadership and management? I did make that metamorphosis, that is, my professional transition, and have never looked back. Okay, now for your next lesson on being the best manager you can be, learning that effective communication will greatly help and enable your ability to be successful as a manager. What we've got here is a failure to communicate, from the 1960's movie Cool Hand Luke, and that is exactly what you don't want. You don't want to fail at communicating. So far in this course we have discussed many new soft skills you will need to have. In this module the skill sets are only going to get softer and soft skills are the harder ones to learn and get good at. So first let's recap what we have done so far in this course and how quality communication is required for each.